My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU’s digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I’m reminded of when my boss asked me whether our entry test was too hard after getting several submissions that wouldn’t even run.
Sometimes prospective employees are just shit.
That is technically correct in a way, but I’ll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.
Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.
Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!
So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.
Mind you that my take and experience is specifically in the context of security.
I struggle to make the parallel that you suggest (which might work for some areas) with a security engineer.
Say, a person learned to brainlessly parrot that pods need to have setting x or z. If they don’t understand them, they can’t offer meaningful insight in cases where that’s not possibile (which might be specific), they can’t provide a solid risk analysis etc.
What is the counterpart to this gap? Because I struggle to see it. Breadth of areas where this superficial knowledge is available is useless, IMHO.
Because a security engineer focused on cloud would rightfully say “pod security is not my issue, I’m focused on protecting the rest of our world from each pod itself.”. With AWS as example: If they then analyze the IAM role structures and to deep into where the pod runs (e.g. shared ec2 vs eks) etc. then it would just be a matter of different focus.
Cloud security is focused on the infrastructure - looks like you’re looking for a security engineer focused on the dev side.
If they bring neither to the table then I’m with you - but I don’t see how “the cloud” is at fault here… especially for security the world as full of “following the script” people long before cloud was a thing.
